Phys.org October 10, 2024 Most of the world’s lakes freeze, with a median ice duration of 218 days. The rate of lake ice loss has markedly accelerated over the past 25 years, with ice melt in some regions across the Northern Hemisphere arriving 45 days per century earlier and with many lakes experiencing increased intermittency of ice cover during winter in addition to ice-free winters. Lake ice loss is expected to affect a substantial proportion of the world’s population. Until recently, both logistical challenges as well as misconceptions of winter as a time of quiescence resulted in limited winter research. […]
Tag Archives: Global disaster
Earth Could Feasibly Descend Into Chaos, Physicists Warn
Science Alert June 19, 2023 Researchers in Portugal have shown that the impact of human activity on the Earth system could result in unpredictable chaos from which there is no return, physicists have calculated. Their arguments are based on the assumption that the ES can be described by a Landau-Ginzburg model, which on its own allows for predicting that the ES evolves, through regular trajectories in the phase space, towards a Hothouse Earth scenario for a finite amount of human-driven impact. They found that the equilibrium point for temperature fluctuations can exhibit bifurcations and a chaotic pattern if the human […]
Study: Four major climate tipping points close to triggering
Phys.org September 11, 2022 Climate tipping points (CTPs) occur when change in large parts of the climate system become self-perpetuating beyond a warming threshold. Triggering CTPs leads to significant, policy-relevant impacts, including substantial sea level rise from collapsing ice sheets, dieback of biodiverse biomes such as the Amazon rainforest or warm-water corals, and carbon release from thawing permafrost. An international team of researchers (Sweden, UK, Germany) provides a comprehensive reassessment of all the nine policy-relevant tipping elements and their CTPs that were originally identified by Lenton et al. (2008). The team updated assessment of the most important climate tipping elements […]
Chilling Report Suggests 1 Out of 5 Countries Could Be Headed For Ecosystem Collapse
Science Alert October 15, 2020 The world’s wealth is built on our planet’s natural ecosystems, and if those collapse, so too might our global economy, experts warn. The Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Index published by the Swiss Re Institute has found just over half of all global GDP – nearly 42 trillion US dollars – is dependent on goods and services provided by the natural world. The index was designed to give governments and businesses a benchmark for the state of local ecosystems important to their economies, in the hope that the data can help inform relevant insurance solutions for […]
Past evidence supports complete loss of Arctic sea-ice by 2035
Science Daily August 10, 2020 Climate model simulations have previously failed to capture elevated temperatures, possibly because they were unable to correctly capture Last Interglacial (LIG) sea-ice changes. An international team of researchers (UK, Canada, USA- University of Washington) shows that the latest version of the fully coupled UK Hadley Center climate model (HadGEM3) simulates a more accurate Arctic LIG climate, including elevated temperatures. Improved model physics, including a sophisticated sea-ice melt-pond scheme, results in a complete simulated loss of Arctic sea ice in summer during the LIG, which has yet to be simulated in past generations of models. This […]
The Locust Plague in East Africa Is Sending Us a Message, And It’s Not Good News
Science Alert July 3, 2020 Swarming in the trillions, voracious insects are destroying precious pastures and crops in what is considered the worst regional locust plague in decades, from Kenya through Ethiopia and Yemen, reaching as far as parts of northern India. According to researchers in Kenya and Germany the first major swarms emerged late last year, after unusually warm and wet weather, and they numbered in the hundreds of billions. Come April, the next generation hit the skies, this time in the trillions. The third generation is expected to take off this July in even larger numbers. Treating huge […]
Aquaculture at the crossroads of global warming and antimicrobial resistance
Science Daily April 20, 2020 Fish farmers use large quantities of antimicrobials to treat or prevent disease on their farms. However, when used inappropriately, antimicrobials are ineffective and foster the development of resistant bacteria. An international team of researchers (France, Germany) conducted a double meta-analysis to explore how global warming and antimicrobial resistance impact aquaculture. They calculated a Multi-Antibiotic Resistance index (MAR) of aquaculture-related bacteria for 40 countries. They showed that aquaculture MAR indices correlate with MAR indices from human clinical bacteria, temperature and countries’ climate vulnerability and infected aquatic animals present higher mortalities at warmer temperatures. They raise the […]